Sunday, February 12, 2012

Plot Summary

As a by-product of consciousness, advanced neural networks operate over-top the framework of older brain developments, retaining the fear response that assisted lesser-conscious beings in fleeing predators and not walking off cliffs so often that they went extinct. Thence arose fearful minds: the conjunction of the old fear response with an advanced conscious attempt to avoid that unpleasant (scary!) response by establishing cold order within the mind. This produced the first Antilife: conscious attempts to restrict the natural flow and change of the world in order to avoid the perceived ending of consciousness caused by a transition out of one like set of states (the continuation of a self-aware entity in the form which that entity views as unique, desirable and mortal) and into another (a new self-aware entity expressed through a new organism).

The ghost thus became afraid that it would perish--afraid in a conscious way, rather than upon instinct. The ghost might lie awake at night, worrying about its transition, much like worrying about its first day at school:

Will I die? When will I die? Will it hurt? What will happen then? I'll be gone! Onoes!

Consciousness here managed to stoke the fires of the old fear response without any danger actually being present. Whereas earlier, a non-sentient shell would--under proper operation--only exhibit a fear response to something fearful, the more advanced brain could now summon a fear response out of nothing save thought.

Example 1: Sloth drinks out of murky lake. Alligator leaps out of lake, jaws outstretched, about to eat it. Sloth perceives alligator. Extreme fear reaction motivates surge of adrenaline through sloth's system. Sloth is filled with overwhelming desire to survive, in order that it may reproduce and spread life, and that there continue to be other sloths--without which the sloth would not be there in the first place. Sloth reacts with the speed to run away. Alligator returns to murky lake. Driven by hunger response, it resolves to be faster next time a sloth stops to drink.

Prognosis: good fear response. Good hunger response.

Example 2: Bob the manager lies awake in bed, worrying that he might have a heart attack when he turns fifty in seventeen years, just like his father did. He rolls over on his left side. After a few minutes, his left arm goes to sleep. Panicked, he takes four aspirin, stays up all night, gets fired, and his kids end up on the street.

Prognosis: bad fear response.

Advanced thought processes are good; a natural consequence of life and a great way to perpetuate and develop it. Fear is good, too. It's the intermix that can allow the fear response to combine with imagination to produce a destructive Antilife, much as the desire to never be hungry again might cause a broken alligator to murder every sloth in the jungle, gorge itself, then starve to death when there are no offspring to eat come spring.

Much as a woodland might need to learn not to let its population of upper-western woodland deer overgraze, die off, starve all remaining predators, overgrow the underbrush, strangle the middle-height plant species, and ultimately destroy the woodland, human populations need to learn to deal with--as first-ever pioneers upon "Earth"--the fearful mind problem, and the resulting Antilife, in order to survive.

Growing Antilife seeks the perfect order: everdeath. The ending of all troublesome, chaotic, mutating, changing life. Life is suffering, after all, filled with both filled and unfulfilled desires, lusts, random thoughts, pain, pleasure, joy and sorrow. The only way to get rid of the bad things is to stamp out life. Antilife, and its associated motivations, are the answer to the "but why?!" of things like war, environmental destruction, et cetera. Why would even the rich try to destroy the planet? Is it because, deep within themselves, they genuinely believe that an invisible man in the sky wants them to? If you believe a story like that, you might as well become religious yourself, and believe in the invisible man. No, a "god"--or whatever other token religious or social movement might explain geocidal/specicidal behavior--can be a similar justification for Antilife behaviors. The delusion in the few who actually do believe in a murder-God is only there as a result. A symptom.

Suffering comes from being alive. Life is the cause of suffering. Without life, there would be no pain; no fear; no hurting of any kind. Because I am a good person, I have decided to help everyone by saving them from having to suffer. When my work is done, none shall suffer.

Explains themsuch lots, ehy? No other equation can provide a rational explanation for all the variables that might be asked of it in explaining human behavior.

Why is Obama willing to use robotic missiles to blow up small children? Why is Obama willing to do that even though it might mean that the relatives of those children overthrow the government and launch a Pakistani nuclear missile at Washington, D.C. that would destroy not only Obama himself, but his own small children? And possibly the entire society and species to which he belongs?

Why does Bob the day laborer vote for Romney, who will only continue taxing his paycheck to pay for an overseas military empire that does nothing more than send his son off to die fighting Ayrabs to enrich people with massive investment portfolios? After which Bob will be evicted for losing his job when he hurt his back?

Why does Regina the Whole Foods shopper vote for Obama, even though Obama perpetuates the same petrochemical and waste management policies that will soon make it impossible for even Whole Foods shoppers to get human-edible, let alone "organic," food? And might result in her son the investment banker being burned alive in a different high-rise in New York?

Little slivers of Antilife. This is all happening according to plan. It's not because people are "stupid" or "confused." The actions are stupid in the sense that they will result in harm to the organism thinking them, yes. The people taking the stupid actions would never consciously admit that they're doing them to cause self-harm. Honest self-harmers--cutters or the more fully suicidal--have found a different way to express the same pain that, on the whole, will do less damage to others.

If I could only dig out this fear. If I could only stop feeling so sick; so wrong; so hurt. Fuck this--I'm out.

What is the cold horror that can arise upon seeing that attitude expressed? Upon seeing a bland creature with a malignant soul trying to destroy, as cleverly or as openly as possible, life itself?

No, you don't accomplish that end by saying--to the rest of the world, or even to yourself--"I'm trying to kill us all." You do it by taking progressively greater actions toward the end goal of everyone being silenced by death. Like weakening the populace, fractionalizing people into groups with hatreds and clannish attitudes, killing whoever you can get away with, and ensuring that everyone will be left with awful grudges and unfinished business so that more killing can happen later.

A little hymnal of stolen Arka, from before the Fall:

Nearer, to Neer
Bring me nearer, to Neer
Nearer, to Neer
Bring me nearer, to Neer
World falls away
Burning in decay
I’m nearer, to Neer
Nearer, to Neer
Holy rain is cleansing
Sweet light is burning
The wickedness and dross
Of all the world, it’s purging
But I’m nearer, to Neer
Nearer, to Neer
We come then to a valley
A cloud-speckled way
Holy and triumphant
Above the foul decay
Sin and strife beneath
Those blessed few who rise
To be nearer, to Neer
Nearer, to Neer
Nearer, to Neer
I’m nearer, to Neer

2 comments:

It would be worth mentioning how this whole 'suffering comes from being alive' rhetoric is in no way privy to 'deathdriven elites' (as I would imagine you would put it) but in part has become a more or less recognized ideology in ethics: antinatalism.

Of course you can argue that people are attracted to such approaches initially out of a fearful mind state or maybe simply out of a contemplation of suffering experienced by sentient beings given an atheological framework (God doesn't love and won't save anyone, 'evolution' is going nowhere etc.), but either way, intellectually, if not emotionally, it has far progressed from that point.

So I don't leave you out in the dark here, the 'Benatarian assymetry' is a basic argument https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZCImAQZTsM though I think the AntiBullshitMan (yes, I did hate having to type that) that I linked you a while back, who I would argue is the most formidable (lengthy writing, big words, complex grammar, abuse of -isms and all that good stuff) promoter of said ideology, is skeptical about it.

Two problems I have with your approach as I understand it from the last back and froth we had over at cyclic lightform development is that: 1) it seems to give moral precedence to net systems (or groups, or whatever) rather than individuals (http://www.animal-ethics.org/why-we-should-consider-sentient-beings-rather-than-ecosystems/) and 2) if unearthing a plant for fun and killing an animal for the same reason are akin, then the issue of suffering is brushed under the carpet altogether (unless you posit that plants do indeed suffer to which I could exclaim "pseudoscience!" though without a high degree of certainty).

I wouldn't always put it "deathdriven elites." Rather, "deathdriven." Poor and bourgeois evil exists, also. But--like assholes willing to sue a bakery over a cake--those kinds of people don't get any kind of serious attention or a platform without some level of elite involvement. (In our case, through the media companies.)

Regarding the problems raised:

1) Moral precedence is for individuals and net systems. An individual is very important; this isn't an argument for collectivism. The best way of serving both individuals and ecosystems is to promote both.

I know that, in the context of current governmental actions here, those things seem to be at odds, but they're not. Happy to back that up, if you want to throw examples this way.

2) Those acts are alike, but differ in degree. Killing a puppy v. killing a baby, e.g.--one is more severe in the sense that it's killing a more refined lightform, thereby causing more damage to the overall process.

So, if a little kid builds a sand castle, and you knock it over and make her cry, you're an asshole. But the action is not as bad as waiting thirty years, letting the kid grow into an adult, then ripping up the oil painting the kid worked on for two weeks straight. Both are bad, one is more severe. The same rationale as why, say, a rape-murder could be worse than a rape-without-murder.

This one is happy to oblige you by saying that plants suffer, but it's of a different sort, and from human perspectives, it's appropriate to say that they "don't suffer," just as it's appropriate to say that it's wrong to rip up plants for fun. =]